


it takes two

by wastrelwoods



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Cave-In, Gen, Genderqueer Mollymauk, Liberal use of the word fuck, Near Death Experiences, briefly beau kicks the shit out of a giant scorpion too, just some enemies being friends, just. gotta have that in there, just. there in the background bein a thing not very central, mlm/wlw solidarity is bein trapped in a cave and cursing each other out, probable overuse of nott's very good message cantrip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 06:14:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14490597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: “Eat a dick,” Beau tells him, sitting back on her heels and pushing the hair back out of her face with a bloodied hand. Molly’s grin gets wider, his own blood still staining the corners of his mouth. But alive, still alive, for this moment if not the next.





	it takes two

**Author's Note:**

> listen i just love those friendships that might devolve into a fistfight one of these days like i love vax and grog and i love beau and molly. best FRIENDS

When the dust settles and the ringing in her ears dies down, Beau is in the dark, and there’s dirt in her mouth. 

She spits, swears, pushes herself off of one flat surface and slides slowly to prop herself against a different one, ninety degrees away. It doesn’t feel enough like standing up to be any real improvement, but for the moment she’s not falling on her ass and that’s something, at least. 

The sound that’s echoing all around her is a low rumble rattle _scratching_ kind of sound, and it doesn’t take much effort to guess it’s the stone settling into its brand new shape. Dust keeps drifting down from above her head to mat itself into her hair, try to clog up her mouth or her eyes, not that those eyes can do much goddamn good in all this dark. “Shit,” Beau says, and then repeats it, for effect, kicking out and finding a nearby slope of half-crumbled rock. Could be the other wall of the tunnel, she barely knows which way is up, but her gut says this wall used to be the mouth of the passage, up until a minute ago. “Shit! Fuck!” 

It’s always tunnels, with these morons, isn’t it? Every week they’re carving through some new sewer or underground river or abandoned mineshaft, deep underground, just waiting to fall in around them. Of course, Nott’s black powder explosive can probably shoulder the better part of the blame for this particular shitshow. 

Beau keeps kicking at the rock just to see if anything will happen, and after a few seconds she hears something move in the darkness over her shoulder. She ducks low with a grunt just as the barbed tail shoots in her direction, missing by a fraction of an inch and colliding against rock with an unpleasant metallic sound. She kicks at the thing, ball of her foot slamming directly into the joint of one of its legs, then follows that up with a haymaker that completely fails to impact. 

Fucking dark! _Fucking_ giant mountain scorpions! Beau slides into her defensive stance, deflects a pincer blow to one side to catch her thigh instead of closing around her torso, and when she’s just about gotten good and tired of deflecting bends down to pick up a hefty piece of stone knocked loose from the collapse and brings it down onto the creature’s head with a sickening crack. 

The bug goes down with a rattling hiss, and Beau lets out a furious scream that had been building inside the prison of her ribcage since she landed here in the dark. “Anyone else?” she howls into the empty, pitch-black passageway. 

There’s a weak moan on the air, she swears she hears it, but it’s distant and strange and it could be coming from any direction. Beau kicks the scorpion right in its fucking stupid thorax and drops to the ground, spitting out more dust. 

Then, from the other side of her friend the brand new wall, there’s a whisper of sound, and then the ringing in her ears returns, in the form of a single chime, like a fork knocking against crystal. “Beau! can you hear me? are you alive in there? You can reply to this message!” 

“Nott?” Beau shakes her head until the last echo of the chime clears, shifts onto her knees and turns to start battering against the stone heap with her palms. “What the fuck? Where the fuck are you?” 

After a few seconds, the chime sounds again, and Nott’s rasping little voice is back in her ear. “The tunnel went ka-pow! Where the fuck are _you_?” She sounds--well, she’s sounded worse, that Beau can remember, but usually only when something big with sharp claws has her cornered. After a shaky, quick breath, Nott blurts out a “you-can-reply-to-this-message” again. 

“Where the fuck do you think I am?” Beau hisses back, “Get me out! Get me the hell out!” 

She can hear grinding and sliding now, the subtle movements of the stone beginning to shift, though she can’t see it. She pushes against the pile with her shoulder and all her strength, bodyslamming it a few times until the breath is knocked out of her. Nothing moves. Nothing fucking moves an inch. Her arm aches from shoulder to wrist, and Beau cradles it. Under her breath, she murmurs, “Shit bitch fuck bastard--”

There’s another chime. “Is Mollymauk with you?” Nott says, and there, now she sounds as bad as Beau’s ever heard her, shrill with anxiety. “He’s not on this side, he’s not answering me, oh, god, what if he’s dead? He might be dead, Beau! Shit, wait, you can re--” 

Beau goes still and quiet, listens for a moment while the dust drifts around her. “Molly? I don’t see h--” 

Then a hand closes around her leg, and Beau almost screams. She pulls away from the sudden grip, which breaks with almost no effort, leaps backwards and nearly twists her ankle on the uneven ground. Something in the pile of rocks moves, and then that something makes a sound, a gravelly grunt of pain, an unfamiliar sound in a familiar register. “Molly,” she says again, dropping to her knees beside the slow-moving lump of him. It’s too dark to see anything more than a bowed head, a twitching tail, the rest of him curled in on himself, groaning into the dust. “Gods, you look like shit.” 

Molly laughs low in his throat, the way he always does, and then coughs, with a rattle that makes the hair stand up on the back of Beau’s neck. “Feel like it too,” he retorts, and that’s it, Beau has to crawl over to him and make him sit up. It doesn’t feel right, him lying there in the rubble like a helpless piece of tenderized meat. 

Beau gets a hand under his head, and another one beneath his ribs, and prys him slowly off the floor, not quite upright but at least closer to it, all his admittedly slight frame resting on Beau. “You gonna fucking give me a hand here?” she tells him. “Or just sit like a useless lump?” 

“You looked like you had it handled,” he groans, his head falling onto her shoulder, arms wrapped around his waist like he’s trying to keep himself in one piece or something. She can’t see the blood dripping off his face, but she can feel it hot and sticky where it’s starting to soak into her cloak. 

“Don’t bleed on me, asshole,” she says, acidly, shifts the both of them to the side until Molly’s leaning against the wall of the passage. “I paid good money for that, it’s reversible.” she digs through his coat for a glass vial and comes up empty. “Where’s your fucking healing potions, Moll?”

Molly just groans in her face, swatting at her hands. “Hey--hey! Buy a girl a drink before you go poking around his person like that--ow, fuck!” 

“Shut up and help me find a potion,” she growls at him. “Fuckin’ bleeding like a gnoll on a spit.”

“You think it’s _my_ fault half a mountain fell on my head?” Molly grumbles, while Beau rummages through his jerkin, at his belt, through her own pack. He shifts and coughs again, his whole chest rattling with the movement, and a ragged gurgle tells Beau there’s blood bubbling out between his lips, too. 

People die from that, Beau’s brain notes unhelpfully. She’s seen it happen. Made it happen. 

There’s fucking broken glass at the bottom of her pack where the healing potion should be. Fifty goddamn gold soaking into the lining and getting coated in dust and debris like a giant middle finger from the universe right to Beau. “Damnit,” she grunts, dust coating her throat and choking the words as she spits them out. “Damnit, I’m out. Fuck!” 

Molly doesn’t speak, but his tail thrashes against the ground, smacking into the stone with a dull thud. His arms stay wrapped around his own ribcage. Beau knows that’s the closest Mollymauk ever gets to letting on that he’s scared, when he goes quiet like that. She feels her throat close over, wants to punch at the wall until she feels better or doesn’t feel at all. 

“Jester and Yasha are digging their way through,” she says, flatly, because people are supposed to pretend everything will work out fine when they’re watching someone die in front of them. “They’ll get here eventually, they can...fucking deal with this.” 

Molly stays quiet, and still, and after a moment Beau gets sick of it and goes back to kicking at the wall, cursing the rocks out every time they fail to move out of the way. Digging into the spaces between them with her fingers and pulling, grabbing one of Molly’s swords off the ground and prying the stones apart until her hands are almost numb. 

There’s no protest from Molly, but after a minute he makes a muffled sound Beau’s brain absolutely refuses to categorize as a whimper. She fumbles the sword and feels it clatter to her feet, stands there staring off into the darkness in the direction of her distant party and listening while Mollymauk Tealeaf cries. 

Fucking _cries_. And there’s nowhere for Beau to run and hide the way she really, really wants to. She grits her teeth, pissed off, eyes blurring, picks up a rock and throws it against the far wall. The way it shatters into pieces is almost worth it. 

“Damn it!” she yells, again, gives Molly a moment to pretend neither of them heard him sob before kneeling down in front of his mashed-up broken bullshit body and emptying her pack inside out on the ground. She twists the fabric around, brushes the glass away and ignores the way it sticks at her fingers. Lifts Molly’s head and squeezes a drop out, then another, and a third before there’s just nothing left. Potion probably doesn’t even work once it’s out of the vial, she knows, but even when Beau’s got nothing she has to try for something anyway. She’s bullheaded like that. Molly licks the vague residue of healing magic off his lips, groans, and speaks in a thick, rough voice that belies his attempt at his usual lilt.

“Not very fair, is it?” he mumbles. “Three years. Less than, probably. There’s sparrows live longer than that.”

Beau leans heavily on the wall beside him, throwing her pack to the floor. “You talk about fair so goddamn much,” she groans. “What gave you the first fucking clue that life cares about _fair_ , huh, Mollymauk? You crawled out of a shitty hole in the ground--”

“--and it looks like I’ll probably die in one, too,” he interrupts. “Kind of symmetry in that, isn’t there? Neat.” 

Beau can’t help it. She kicks him. “Don’t say that shit, okay?” 

“I’ll say what the hell I want,” Molly snaps, before doubling over so his horns are resting on his knees. “Fuck,” he says, with feeling, between breaths that whistle and flutter in his throat. “Hurts,” he says, sounding so much like a scared little kid for a second that Beau feels like she’s been kicked in the chest. 

“Just give ‘em time,” she lies. “They’ll bust through that wall any second now, yeah? We can fix this.” 

Beau’s not a good liar. The way Molly’s shoulders shake she can tell he knows, but he still shifts to lay his head on her shoulder. Beau doesn’t shake him off. He’s fucking dying, and she’s harsh, not cruel. 

“Don’t leave me down here,” he says, so quiet she could almost miss it if there were any other sound to fill the long, dark silence. “After. If you can. I hate this bloody place.” 

Beau feels like she’s freezing from the inside out, ice coating her lungs and twisting her stomach and shriveling her heart. She reaches up and musses his hair, a little too rough. “Moll, please. We don’t have to talk about that yet.”

“I’m hardly gonna get another chance, am I?” he whinges, coughs deep in his chest and suddenly starts gasping. Beau slides away to grab him by the shoulders, force his head up, and sees him staring wide-eyed, mouth open, breathless, his face pale and agonized. 

“Shit, Molly, what the _fuck--_ ” She holds him down and starts prodding at his chest, feels the ominous grinding of his broken ribs and the shallow movement of his diaphragm. It’s a lung, probably, giving out on him under all the strain, and Beau’s no healer but she spent years and years having the functions of the humanoid body drilled in to her day in and day out. She’s spent months learning how to manipulate those functions with a well-placed hit, every time Dairon pounds her into the dust and calls it a lesson. “Hold still,” she grimaces, and jabs at Molly’s sternum, drives a thumb between his ribs, presses at all the right points and hopes against hope that she got it right.

Molly screams without any air behind it and his head knocks against the wall, but an instant after that his gasps turn deeper, air forcing its way back into his chest, and his hands reach out to wrap tight in the fabric of Beau’s cloak, clawing at her while keeping her close. Slowly, his breathing settles back to that unsteady rattling from before. “That was terrible,” he grunts, shaking all over. 

“You’re fucking welcome,” Beau tells him, and notices she’s shaking too. Just a little. 

His face is shining with blood and now wet with tears, too, but he still makes space for a cockeyed grin. “How could I forget my manners,” he says, half a wheeze. “A _thousand_ thanks, Beauregard, my very dear close friend, bless you, I’m so eternally grateful for your aid, what _would_ I do without--”

“Eat a dick,” Beau tells him, sitting back on her heels and pushing the hair back out of her face with a bloodied hand. Molly’s grin gets wider, his own blood still staining the corners of his mouth. But alive, still alive, for this moment if not the next. “I don’t know why the hell I bother.” 

“It’s because you love me, darling.”

“Oh, keep dreaming.”

“Beau.” The grin drops from Molly’s face, slowly, and she reaches up to wipe the dust from her eyes. They’re clouding up on her again. “Beau, I don’t want to die.” 

Without the grin to draw her eye away from the bloodied mess of him Beau can see him trembling, shivering, small, beaten to a pulp. His head lolls, and his tail flicks weakly at his side. It’s dark in this tunnel, and cold, and all Beau can do is prolong the goddamn inevitable and wait for Molly’s chest to stop rising and falling. But telling Molly how completely goddamn helpless the both of them are isn’t going to help either of them. “Maybe you won’t,” she grunts. “Maybe we get lucky.” 

“The whole tunnel could turn to cheese,” Molly says, with a dismal attempt at humor. “Then we could eat our way out.”

Beau considers kicking him again. “You’re such a bastard.” 

He picks himself up with a groan, moves just far enough to slide and half-tumble into Beau’s lap. She doesn’t have the first clue what to do with his pointy, annoying dead weight, settles for just sitting back and letting him lie there, head pillowed on her abdomen, staying awkwardly still so she doesn’t jostle him. “The feeling’s mutual,” Molly rasps, curling around her and clinging like a big stubborn limpet with claws. 

It’s better, in a strange way, being close enough to Molly to keep measuring the unsteady hammer of his heartbeat from moment to moment, feel the subtle shift of his ragged breathing. There’s something more sure about it. Almost comforting, except for the way she can feel it weakening as the minutes crawl by. Molly’s eyes flutter shut, and she reaches up to shake him. “Not yet,” she tells him. “Come on, stay awake, don’t go yet.” 

Molly stirs a little, but his eyes stay closed. Beau shakes him again. “I know you can hear me, asshole,” she accuses, her throat thick with the settling dust. but Molly seems to have her beat for sheer stubbornness, he doesn’t move. “Come on!” 

His pulse is fluttering in his neck where her fingers are pressed to it, faint and getting fainter, more of his own blood dribbling down his chin with every breath. 

“If you die I swear I’m gonna kill you,” Beau growls into his ear, but the threat doesn’t seem to phase him at all, because the next thing his pulse does is stutter and miss a beat. Beau holds her breath and slaps him across the face, screwing her eyes shut, shaking so hard it feels like the fucking tunnel is shifting around her. “Come on!” she says again, loud and sharp enough to echo off the stone around her. 

Molly grunts, and his tail smacks against her shin, and Beau takes the hit with a grin as a sudden, blinding ray of light illuminates the pair of them. She turns and sees the pile of rubble beginning to crumble at one side, hears a familiar cheer from Jester as the rockslide shifts. 

Nott chimes back in her head, and it’s disorienting because Beau can hear the reedy tremble of her voice through the gap in the wall, simultaneously. “We’re through! Where are you? Where’s Mollymauk? You can reply to--” 

Beau turns to the light at the end of the tunnel, and waves her arm. “Over here!” she shouts, voice breaking. “Over here, someone help me heal this fucker!” 

There’s a clamor from her friends beyond the wall, three or four hands reaching through the gap at once, one of them Jester’s, and Molly shudders as his eyes fly open and the blue light of her healing spell sinks into his chest. Beau wipes the dust out of her eyes and hides her grin in her sleeve. 

“About goddamn time,” she grumbles.

**Author's Note:**

> im also @wastrelwoods on twitter and tumblr and it turns out i really, RRREALLY like writing beau so it probably will happen again


End file.
